Yay! I've finally plunged and went down the WHS path. Scored a mint HP MediaSmart EX490 from Christchurch Harvey Norman Moorhouse for NZ$699 (RRP at $1149 or there-about). Norman Ross still priced theirs at $1099, and even went over to Global PC next door to price a custom built which is at $1099.)

Anyhow, this EX490 has Celeron 2.2GHz and capable of 64-bit, so hope when WHSv2 Vail is out, it is upgradable, otherwise I am just as happy with a WHS. :-D.

I had to restore Tardis; at one stage with configuration, I decided to enable automatic update and what-not, and I think that may have "ruin" the setup process. What a mission to try to restore as the HP's eBook manual wasn't written for Windows 7 client. Anyhow, found few helps online and eventually set static IP address in 169.37.37.42, with firewall and antivirus deactivated, while connected directly between a client PC and the WHS. Then that worked.

This time round, I opted for custom configuration for update, and it got to the end of joining the WHS (from client PC).

Yes. I installed vmware server on mine. Need one drive not attached the the storage pool otherwise the migrator tries to move the vm files, and being a diy machine I've got 8gb of ram.....but Whs being w2k3 It only uses half. Waiting for vail!!!

What do you have in your VM? I got iTunes on Tardis eventhough it has Twonkyserver and Firefly came built-in. However I prefer iTunes Home Sharing. Just not sure how it mingle with other DLNA/Media Streaming apps.

It's a blackbox external hard drive (Seagate) - anyhow, I was thinking more along the line of connecting it to WHS as independent storage, then copy its content over to WHS at \\server\share\, once completed, then I format/add it to the DE pool, would that work better/faster than copying content over network from the current PC the hard drive is connected to?